Earth Keeps Spinning

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Earth Keeps Spinning

What book
do I pull from the shelf
in this hour
marking my friend’s
return to that light-drenched

inkling before everything
collapses?

Which title, which
weight shall I
covet? What
do we hold if not
each other?

Being no one, I cannot say.
The earth keeps spinning
even as I walk
to the mailbox,
anticipating new words.

He cannot read these lines.

I do not write them.

 

* * *

“Earth Keeps Spinning” was first published by Red River Review in August 2018.

 

 

16 thoughts on “Earth Keeps Spinning”

  3. Pingback: Earth Keeps Spinning — O at the Edges – jetsetterweb

  5. A “Classic Okaji” piece that I’ve loved for awhile. You say it was published in mid-2018, Bob, but I feel that I’ve read it in 2017 or perhaps earlier. Even if not, it’s a great poem, with its reverence-nostalgia-lament for [a] “return to that light-drenched/inkling before everything/collapses.” It’s as hopeful and beautiful a rendering for the finality of life that I can imagine, and it gives me a warm, great comfort to imagine your vision for (what I read as) the just-pre-afterlife.

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    • Thanks, Leigh. This was written just a few months before it was published, but probably bears commonalities with others you’ve read, hence its familiarity. I can’t seem to get away from myself! 🙂

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      • Or I have a weird sense of time! In any case, very enjoyable, even in the sheepish admitting that I’m benefiting from your loss, but somehow I feel liberated from Schadenfreude! I don’t wish you more pain nor am I happy that you have had pain, but I can somehow have pleasure in the wordplay and the narrative. Thank you, again, for sharing such deep-down stories with us, Bob.

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